Social Media

HOW TO: Give Your Photos a Vintage Look

Your profile photo is an important part of your online personality, offering a glimpse of you to the wider world. We've previously brought you tips for creating the perfect profile pic, and in this post we'll be looking at some great online services that can help you create a variety of fun, vintage-looking pics for your profile.

So, for anyone who doesn't have photo editing know-how, expensive editing software and a load of time to spare, here's how to create a retro profile pic in a matter of minutes using some absolutely free, entirely online services.

Let us know in the comments if we've missed any!

The Original Shot

This is the photo we're editing, shown here as a control pic so you can gauge how dramatic the effects we've picked really are. A standard snap from a point-and-shoot camera, there's nothing wrong with this image, but read on to see how it can be made so much more fun in just a few clicks.

In film photography, the cross processing effect was achieved by switching different chemicals used to process print or slide films. This made for dramatic colors, contrast and grain.

Although the effects of cross processing have been known since the 1960s, it was in the 1990s that the effect reached the height of its popularity with photographers like Nick Knight bringing cross processing to fashion and studio work.

How to Get the Effect

It's possible to recreate the effect using photo software by playing around with the color balance and contrast ratios (there are plenty of tutorials around the web to help). If you don't have the time/inclination/correct software, then Phixr offers the effect at the click of a button.

Simply head to Phixr and hit "get started," which will bring up account options. If you want to set up a free account you can do so from here, but you can also skip this step, which will give you access to Phixr (as long as you're not on it for more than six hours straight, which, trust us, you won't be).

You then need to upload your chosen pic from your computer (or via a URL) and hit the upload button, at which point the pic will be be resized if it's too big.

After your photo has loaded, select the "color effects" button from the icon menu on the left hand side and scroll down one line to select "cross process."

At this point there are options to adjust the brightness, contrast and opacity, but for the effect in the image above we kept it all at the auto levels pre-loaded by the site. The effects are previewed, however, so if you'd like to play around, you won't be committed to the changes until you click "execute."

Although many technical advances have been made now, back in the "old days" the colors in photo prints were made up of dyes that decay with age — especially if exposed to light — hence why so many of your parents' or grandparents' photos take on pink or yellow tones as the years go by.

The faded color helps to date a photo almost as much as the outlandish fashions that might be found in it, and is a great effect to give your modern pic a vintage feel.

How to Get the Effect

Drop into Picnik and click the "get started now" button. Upload your chosen photo, hit the "create" tab along the top, and select "effects" from the secondary tab menu. Now scroll down the menu on the left hand side of your display and choose "1960s" which brings up further options.

You get the option to keep the round corners (we did, as it helps achieve the dated look even more) and what color you want to fill them in with (we chose white for a subtle effect) as well as how much "fade" you want. We maxed our fade in the pic above (zero percent) but again, you can play around with a preview, so feel free to experiment before hitting "apply" and saving the photo back to your computer.

In the 1960s, cheap cameras like the Holga and Diana were mass-produced as "toys" and were predictably made of cheap construction and parts, including such photographic abominations plastic lenses.

Of course, though poorly made, these low quality cameras actually produced really interesting effects such as light flares, blurs, distortion and vignetting (darker or blurry edges) that have, in recent years, gained the cameras a cult following (best seen from the Lomography movement) by those interested in the unpredictable and often beautiful results.

How to Get the Effect

If you're at all interested in super-simple retro photo effects then you need to head to Rollip pronto as it offers over 40 options. We narrowed our choice down to this "Styled Lenses" option which emulates the kind of effect you could hope to get from a quirky old-school film camera.

To find it on the Rollip site, hit "click here to start" on the home page and then scroll through the "more effects" option until you get to page 5/10. Click "Styled Lenses" and select the photo in the top left hand corner. Once you've done this, it's just a matter of clicking to browse your computer for a photo and wait for Rollip to work its magic.

Coloring black and white photographs by hand using photo oils or tinting pencils was popular in the first half of 20th Century before the advent of affordable color film. Recreated digitally, it makes for a nostalgic effect and can increase the emphasis to a certain part of an image, such as a person, or a features like lips or eyes.

How to Get the Effect

You do need an account to use Photobucket, but it's a simple email and password affair, so not too arduous to get set up. Once you're good to go, upload an image from your computer and then hit "edit." After your photo has loaded, select "effects" from the tab menu at the top of the page and choose the first option called "color splash."

The software will then greyscale your photo to black and white, leaving you to choose which part you want to fill in with color. The actual coloring in is super-easy: Just dab the circle over the area you want the color restored too. We stuck to the standard size blob in the image above, which worked fine, but if what you want colored is smaller, or more detailed, you can change the blob size to suit.

Finally we took advantage of another free effect from Photobucket to complete our image and employed the "blur edges" tool (on the default setting) from the effects menu to give a blurry vignette feel. This helps focus the eye on the colorful figure.

Polaroid photographs are iconic and immediately recognizable as the instant photo format of choice. Polaroids ruled up to the start of of digital photography when slower, film-based formats were pushed out of the market.

Since Polaroid's decline, nostalgia for the product has seen various groups campaigning for a revival of the format. With some success, film and cameras are now back on the shelves. It looks like Polaroid will live on for a few more years yet.

How to Get the Effect

There are various Polaroid-erizing tools on the web, the most notable of which is Poladroid, however, this requires a download and we're nothing if not impatient. We wanted an in-browser service.

Picnik offers a Polaroid look as part of its "frames" options, but that doesn't give the image an aged look. We countered this by using the 1960s effect (detailed above in number two) but nixing the round corners and setting the fade to 40 percent for a less dramatic effect.

Once you've applied that, go to the frames menu under the "create" tab and select "Polaroid." We opted for a white background color and a five percent angle. When you've made your choices, it's just a matter of saving the pic down to your computer and you're all done!

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